Impeaching a president

Many of us may presume that we will be told by electronic media that the United States Senate has acquitted President Donald Trump who earlier had been impeached by the US House of Representatives for “abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.”

National Archives/Newsmakers (L) and Cynthia Johnson/Liaison (R) tell us that until Trump’s impeachment, there have only been two impeached presidents charged by the House with committing “high crimes and misdemeanors”: Andrew Johnson and William Jefferson Clinton. Like Trump, the two were acquitted by the Senate. So no US president has been removed from office using the impeachment process. 

The first impeachment came more than a century earlier, as “our political leaders were trying to pull the nation together after the Civil War, long before Clinton faced charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in 1998,” according to National Archives et al.

Johnson, the 17th president of the US, was accused of violating the Tenure of Office Act, among other crimes. The 1867 law required Senate approval before a president could remove any member of his Cabinet who had been confirmed by the upper chamber of Congress.

The House had voted to impeach Johnson on Feb. 24, 1868, three days after he dumped his secretary of war, a radical Republican named Edwin M. Stanton.

Johnson was impeached by legislators who viewed him as being too sympathetic to former slaveholders; they were outraged when he vetoed legislation protecting the rights of freed slaves. Strangely, he was spared conviction and ouster from office by a single vote.

Clinton, the nation’s 42nd president, was impeached by the House of Representatives on Dec. 19, 1998, for allegedly misleading a grand jury about his extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky in the White House, and then persuading others to lie about it, too. The charges against him were perjury and obstruction of justice.

After a trial, the Senate acquitted Clinton of both charges on Feb. 12, 1998.

*      *      *

It was a whistleblower that triggered the Trump impeachment drama.  In his August 12 , 2019 complaint, he laid out the accusation based on  information from multiple US government officials that Trump was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign county in the 2020 US election.” Trump, he wrote, “sought to pressure the (newly elected) Ukranian leader to take actions to help the president’s 2020 reelection bid.”

The whistleblower’s identity has not been revealed, at least to the public.

*      *      *

Although the Trump whistleblower is not similar to Watergate’s whistleblower Deep Throat, I find it apropos to dwell on the Watergate scandal as it talks of a president cleansed of wrongdoing, but who only two years later, is shown as indeed having committed wrongdoing, and is forced to resign to avoid impeachment proceedings.

According to History.Com, the origins of the Watergate break-in “lay in the hostile political climate of the time. By 1972, when Republican President Richard M. Nixon was running for reelection, the United States was embroiled in the Vietnam war, and the country was deeply divided.

“A forceful presidential campaign therefore seemed essential to the president and some of his key advisers. Their aggressive tactics included what turned out to be illegal espionage. In May 1972, as evidence would later show, members of Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (known derisively as CREEP) broke into the Democratic National Committee’ Watergate headquarters, stole copies of top-secret documents and bugged the office’s phones.

“ Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein deserve a great deal of the credit for uncovering the details of the Watergate scandal. Their reporting won them a Pulitzer Prize and was the basis for their best-selling book ‘All the President’s Men.’ Much of their information came from an anonymous whistleblower they called Deep Throat, who in 2005 was revealed to be W. Mark Felt, a former associate director of the FBI. The wiretaps failed to work properly, however, so on June 17 a group of five burglars returned to the Watergate building.  As the prowlers were preparing to break into the office with a new microphone, a security guard noticed someone had taped over some of the building’s door locks. The guard called the police, who arrived just in time to catch them red-handed.

“It was not immediately clear that the burglars were connected to the president, though suspicions were raised when detectives found copies of the reelection committee’s White House phone number among the burglars’ belongings.

“In August, Nixon gave a speech in which he swore that his White House staff was not involved in the break-in. Most voters believed him, and in November 1972, the president was reelected in a landslide victory.

“It later came to light that Nixon was not being truthful. A few days after the break-in, for instance, he arranged to provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in ‘hush money’ to the burglars.

“Then, Nixon and his aides hatched a plan to instruct the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to impede the FBI’s investigation of the crime. This was a more serious crime than the break-in: It was an abuse of presidential power and a deliberate obstruction of justice.

“Meanwhile, seven conspirators were indicted on charges related to the Watergate affair. At the urging of Nixon’s aides, five pleaded guilty to avoid trial; the other two were convicted in January 1973.

“By that time, a growing handful of people – including Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, trial judge John J. Sirica and members of a senate investigating committee – had begun to suspect that there was a larger scheme afoot. At the same time, some of the conspirators began to crack under the pressure of the cover-up. Anonymous whistleblower ‘Deep Throat’ provided key information to Woodward and Bernstein.

“A handful of Nixon’s aides, including white House counsel John Dean, testified before a grand jury about the president’s crimes; they also testified that Nixon had secretly taped every conversation that took place in the Oval Office. If prosecutors could get their hands on those tapes, they would have proof of the president’s guilt.

“Nixon struggled to protect the tapes during the summer and fall of 1973. His lawyers argued that the president’s executive privilege allowed him to keep the tapes to himself. But Judge Sirica, the senate committee and an independent special prosecutor named Archibald Cox were all determined to obtain them.

 “When Cox refused to stop demanding the tapes, Nixon ordered that he be fired, leading several Justice Department officials to resign in protest. (These events, which took place on Oct. 20, 1973, are known as the Saturday Night Massacre.) Eventually, Nixon agreed to surrender some – but not all – of the tapes.

“Early in 1974, the cover-up and efforts to impede the Watergate investigation began to unravel.  On March 1, a grand jury appointed by a new special prosecutor indicted seven of Nixon’s former aides on various charges related to the Watergate affair. The jury, unsure if they could indict a sitting president, called Nixon an ‘unindicted co-conspirator.’

“In July, the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes. While the president dragged his feet, the House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Nixon for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, criminal cover-up and several violations of the Constitution.

“Finally, on August 5, Nixon released the tapes, which provided undeniable evidence of his complicity in the Watergate crimes. In the face of almost certain impeachment by Congress, Nixon resigned in disgrace on Aug. 8, and left office the following day.”

“ Six weeks later, after Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn in as president, he pardoned Nixon for any crimes he had committed while in office.”

Writes HISTORY.COM EDITORS: “Nixon’s abuse of presidential power had a long-lasting effect on American political life, creating an atmosphere of cynicism and distrust. While many Americans had been deeply dismayed by the outcome of the Vietnam war, and saddened by the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and other leaders, Watergate added further disappointment to a national climate already soured by the difficulties and losses of the previous decade.”

*      *      *

Email: [email protected]